CiviCRM, Google Maps, and front end editing-in-place

Sofie.org

The Network of Sacred Heart Schools is an association of Catholic independent schools and the U.S. Province of the Society of the Sacred Heart. The integration of CiviCRM deeply into their new website helps keep their contact data current with much less effort on their part, as well as updating their publically facing maps and information on-the-fly and streamlining event management for conferences they hold.

Functionality

Key site functionality was to integrate maps that update automatically based on school data stored in CiviCRM, as well as the ability to register participants for conferences and meetings and take custom data at registration. Ideally they wanted a designated school contact to be able to update public contact information for staff at their school as well.

Background

In our initial discussions about revamping the site, we indicated that the new site could be much more dynamic, so that maps could be generated from live data, users could update their own information, and events could be managed in a more cohesive and integrated way.

Challenges

There were a number of challenges.

For example, while we started out with a simpler vision of having more in depth information and features for the U.S. schools (which are in the Network), as the project progressed, staff at the Network changed course and indicated that they would actually like to have all the features available to all of the international schools as well. We revised our custom module to expand functionality and make things more flexible for them.

Another challenge was the desire for administrators (and in the future, designated school contacts) to be able to edit many contacts at once, preferably without having to learn a new CiviCRM interface on top of the other new website changes.

Developed by

Why did this project use CiviCRM?

We considered a few other options, such as whether they wanted to continue taking registrations for their conferences using embedded Google forms that fed into a spreadsheet, but we decided on CiviCRM early on because of its deep integration with Drupal and the ability to use the data in so many places without having to duplicate effort and the ease of updating the information.